


The New Black

by mumuinc



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Orange is the New Black Fusion, Multi, Raising Harry Potter, Sirius Black Raises Harry Potter, Sirius Black in Azkaban, Sirius Black is a bit like Jean Valjean
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26543206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: After being framed for the betrayal of his friends and the murder of 12 muggles, Sirius Black is shipped off into the maximum security tower in Azkaban. Surviving the prison tower with only dementors and Death Eaters for company is no mean feat. It doesn't help that mere months after he first arrives, baby Harry Potter magically appears in his cell showing definite signs of abuse.With no other humans in the prison fortress and needing help to care for the baby, Sirius tries to navigate a tense standoff with the Death Eaters against whom he had fought in the war, and finds help in the most unlikely places when he discovers one night that his crazy cousin, Bellatrix, is three months pregnant with child when she was sentenced to Azkaban herself.
Relationships: Sirius Black & Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Sirius Black/Original Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Child of Azkaban](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15068012) by [LonelyHarvest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LonelyHarvest/pseuds/LonelyHarvest). 



For much of Wizarding Britain, All Hallows of 1981 was the moment that the war ended and the world began to turn again. No one knew how it happened only that it did, only that it did. Wizards woke in the morning receiving their morning owls with the gladdest tidings of the vanquishment of You Know Who and the ultimate triumph of the little Potter boy, the sole survivor of You Know Who’s attack on the Potter Cottage in Godric’s Hollow. They were calling him the Boy Who Lived.

For Sirius Black, his watch striking midnight on All Hallows of 1981 was the moment his world ended, for there was nothing that could have prepared him for the gruesome sight of the Potter’s destroyed cottage as he touched down his flying motorbike on the empty church courtyard of St Agnes Parish. He could feel his fingers stiff in the cold of oncoming winter, even with the smooth black gloves Lily had gifted him the previous Christmas, a matching set with the heavy black leather jacket on his shoulders, as he lifted them off the bike’s handlebars and stared for a long sickened moment in horrified fascination at the blinding flash of green light that emanated from the second floor window, the one that overlooked the front yard, the one that opened into baby Harry’s nursery. The light seemed soundless at first before it was succeeded by what felt like a sonic boom that blew off the entire east wall facing the church steeple.

“No,” Sirius cried, his breath misting in the dead of the night as he hopped off his bike and raced towards the Potter’s home. “No no no no!“

The green hazy form of the _Morsmordre_ hovered over the house as a hooded masked man in black robes slumped over in front of the wrought iron gates half torn off their hinges from the force of the blast. The man was laughing hysterically as he pulled his wand from his sleeve and conjured the Dark Mark above the destroyed cottage, confirming Sirius’ most dreadful fears. He’d gotten to him—Voldemort had gotten to James, to Lily… Harry…

“ _Stupefy!”_ he yelled just as the masked Death Eater saw him approach. He didn’t turn to see if the intruder had fallen or stayed down. All around him the smell of ozone, the mark of the Killing Curse, rolled in sickening waves, choking the night air as surely as the falling bits of concrete from the exploded house.

He had to struggle to keep the bile down as he stepped over the crumpled body of the Death Eater, lying on top of Lily’s lovingly cultivated pink rose bushes. The man, whoever he was, had already been grievously injured by the blast. Someone would come later to apprehend him, Sirius figured. Tonight it would not be him. He needed first to quench the ghastly curiosity that drove him to steal into the house quietly, past the open front door. Here, the smell of death was even more overpowering than it was outside.

The hall opened into the eerily quiet, undisturbed sitting room. All around were signs that James and Lily had been preparing for a Halloween celebration with Harry, and they’d been hoping, with Sirius and Peter if they were able to come. Neither of them had. Peter begged off most social engagements since he’d been made the Potters’ Secret Keeper. Sirius had been away on an Order mission that had only just ended. He was here now only because he wanted to catch his best friend and his family up with the goings on in the Order, maybe to wallow a bit in creature comforts that Lily always plied him with whenever he visited to fulfill his godfatherly duties to Harry so the couple could catch some time to themselves, and then he’d intended to fly back to his dump of a flat in Leeds and sleep like the dead for the next twenty four hours before the debrief at Headquarters with Dumbledore.

All thoughts of restful sleep fled him now as he spotted James’ crumpled form, unmoving, undamaged, but undoubtedly cold and dead, on the steps that led to the second floor. His blood felt like ice in his veins as he knelt and touched his best friend’s cold skin tenderly, two fingers gently closing the blank hazel eyes with a silent prayer to the god of death. Even dead, the look of unfathomable fear for the safety of his family was etched deep in the lines that crinkled around James Potter’s eyes. Sirius couldn’t bear to see him.

 _I’m sorry, my brother_ , he couldn’t say aloud. How he’d failed him so spectacularly.

Upstairs, the stench of death was ever thicker: Lily fallen over in front of Harry’s crib, her hair like a blood-colored halo over her unmoving shoulders and back. A quick check on the pulse in her neck confirmed that she was gone too. Sirius could barely see through the blur of tears spilling on his cold cheeks. He couldn’t suppress the choked sob that bubbled out of his throat as he turned to check the crib.

A tiny wail answered and he leapt up. Harry was standing, clutching the rails of his crib, his pale face streaked with a bit of blood that dripped from a lightning bolt cut on his forehead, his mouth bubbling with drool as he cried for his parents. He was alive! Harry was _alive_!

Gingerly, he picked up his godson. Harry quieted immediately as Sirius clutched the boy to his chest. Harry was shivering in the unspeakable cold that had settled over his destroyed nursery.

“Hush, Prongslet,” Sirius tried to say through his tears. Even holding his godson close, he couldn’t keep himself from teetering towards the hole in his heart where James and Lily resided. They were dead now, dead and gone and there was only one person who could have caused this travesty of a betrayal.

The sound of booted feet on linoleum alerted Sirius to the presence of another intruder into the house. He gripped his wand tightly and held Harry close. If that Death Eater he’d left outside was waking, or perhaps Voldemort himself—

He backed from the nursery door and nearly stumbled on a heap of black robes on the floor, the sort neither James nor Lily would wear. No Voldemort then. Sirius had been in the dark wizard’s presence enough times in his pretense at being another Black interested in joining the Death Eaters, part of his Order mission to infiltrate the enemy ranks and gain vital information to turn the tide of the war, to know this was _his_ robes. So he was gone. Like the prophecy had stated, Harry had vanquished him.

Small comfort.

He held his breath, covering Harry’s still hiccuping mouth with one hand, to keep the baby silent as he held his wand aloft—

“Black!” Hagrid exclaimed just as Sirius brandished his wand for attack.

Warm relief flooded him as the hulking form of the half-giant gameskeeper of Hogwarts emerged from the hall. “Hagrid! What are you doing here?”

“Dumbledore sent me,” Hagrid told him. “Is that—“

“Yeah,” Sirius choked as he held Harry close. “Yeah, he’s still alive.” That tear in his heart screamed at him. _Justice!_ He stared at Hagrid. Perhaps—

“Will you take him to Dumbledore?” Sirius asked, bouncing Harry a bit to keep the baby calm as he nearly started bawling again at the sight of the stranger. “I have—unfinished business.”

Hagrid’s stare in the gloom was long and unfathomable. “Aye, Black.”

Sirius fished into the front pocket of his jeans and procured his bike’s keys. “Here. You can take Marigold. Be faster if you flew, and keep Harry comfortable on the sidecar.”

Hagrid took Harry from him and accepted the keys without comment. “Where are yeh goin’?”

Sirius’ grey eyes were cold despite the glisten of tears. “To hunt a traitor.”

* * *

The next twenty four hours did end up being blank in his memory. He couldn’t remember what he had done after he handed Harry off to Hagrid. The only thought that rolled in his mind over and over was _It was Peter!_ as he tracked the traitorous rat from Peter’s flat in Sutton, through Morden Hall Park, across Sutton College, where Remus would have gone if magical Britain wasn’t at war, down to a residential street five blocks from Peter’s home.

He couldn’t remember what it was he’d said when he’d finally confronted his friend. By then, he’d been completely blinded by grief, that chasm in his heart that was steadily deepening into an abyss from which there would be no return. He hadn’t been holding his wand though, perhaps still subconsciously aware that if he were, he might have cursed Peter first rather than demand an explanation for his betrayal. But Peter, it seemed, was the smarter wizard this time. Sirius had scarcely caught up to him, flinging his hysterical demands for answers than Wormtail had drawn his wand and hurled a Reductor curse that would have made James proud, had James been alive and had the curse not been aimed at the open residential square, destroying half a block of flats and killing and maiming the muggles that had surrounded them.

He couldn’t remember what happened next—Ministry wizards swarming him, Aurors immobilizing, Stunning, and then perhaps even an argument to kill him on the spot. By then, the last vestiges of the fragile tether to sanity Sirius had kept since seeing the destroyed Potter cottage finally fled him. He recalled laughing and sobbing, tinged with hysteria and maddened grief at how masterful Peter had been in not only orchestrating their best friend’s death but also ensuring that Sirius would take the fall. Who couldn’t have been a better patsy but the scion of a family so dark, the last living relatives were all almost certainly Death Eaters themselves? And Sirius taking all those spying missions trying to get into the Death Eater ranks…

It was perfect.

Even now, three days later, as he hunkered in the cold, manacled, hand and feet, to the railings of the rickety old boat that masqueraded as a fishing schooner, bound for the impenetrable prison fortress of Azkaban, he couldn’t help but feel bitterly impressed at Wormtail’s masterful betrayal. The sickness that gripped him as he retched overboard had nothing to do with the icy, choppy waters of the North Sea as the boat led him, inexorably, to the eternity that he would spend in Azkaban.

“Don’t bother throwing yourself overboard, Black,” the Auror-on-duty told him as the boat docked at the mouldering rickety jetty. “Ain’t nothing but dementors awaiting traitors and murderers like your ilk down here, boy.”

Sirius retched again but there was nothing more to bring up. He’d hurled everything out as soon as the first spray of frigid seawater hit his face and woken him from the grief-stricken fugue that gripped him in the past however many days it had been since—he didn’t want to relive it in his head, not as Azkaban loomed dark and imposing and impenetrable before him. It felt as if the very stones that made up the prison sucked up every sign of life all around. High above, he could see the ripple of black wraith-like creatures hovering, flying, above the stone ramparts of the fortress. Dementors.

It was a long hike from the rocky shores to the Administration Office on the south wing of the fortress. The office was rectangular, squat and small, in contrast to the massive dark grandeur of the prison tower itself. There were no connecting doors or pathways, as the tower sprung from black craggy sheer rock face of the island. Azkaban was not built for there to be any escape.

Sirius was drenched and shivering, the exposed pale skin of his arms prickled with gooseflesh, as the Auror-on-duty shoved him into the office. Three pairs of desks lined the walls of the office. The dispassionate white light that lit the office was a sharp clinical contrast to the heavy gloom that surrounded the fortress.

“So this is Sirius Black,” a heavy-set blond man in the same burgundy robes as Auror-on-duty said as he was dragged by his manacles into the small cubicle at the opposite end of the office. The cubicle was sparse and clean, housing only a desk with a small gold plaque that read “Auror Warden Reginald Pickering,” and an overflowing wooden filing cabinet behind the desk.

“Spitting image of his da’, ye reckon?” Auror-on-duty sneered as the Warden picked up the large wizarding camera and shoved him up against the wall. “Here boy, hold this up.”

The plaque in his hands was magical, his prisoner number printing from the form that appeared in the Warden’s in-tray. Sirius was too drained, too blank to understand that ᛈᛉ390 would be all that he would be known as henceforth. He blinked as the flash went off, white and blinding like the office lights. Dimly, he wondered what he must half looked like—half-crazed as he was with grief, despair and self-loathing, his normally wavy, gorgeous black locks greasy from not washing for the three days he spent in Auror custody before they shipped him off here. He’d been relieved of his jacket and wand in the Auror office in the Ministry. Crouch and the arresting Aurors thought the studs and safety pins decorating the jacket might have been used as a weapon if he so desired. They’d all wondered, when his bare arms were exposed, how he was an unMarked Death Eater, but hadn’t dwelled on the fact.

“Aye,” Warden said, grabbing Sirius’ chiseled jaw to look him in his vacant, staring, pale grey eyes, as flat and dead as James’ had been that night, because the part of Sirius that clung to life during the war had also died as he’d looked on his best friend’s cold dead face. “Pretty young face, the lot of them Blacks. Me mam went to Hogwarts with one the lot of them. Said there was naught a man as good-looking as Cygnus and Orion Black. Studmuffins, she called them. All the girls be half-in love wif them, and a good number of the boys too. Faces of angels—”

“And hearts as dark as the river Styx,” Auror-on-duty intoned, mild disgust evident as he watched Warden manhandle the young inmate into a position that bared the boy’s neck as his prisoner number was tattooed magically with the Warden’s wand.

Sirius barely blinked as the hiss of magic pricked his skin. Heat bloomed as the feeling of a thousand needles laced with indelible black ink prickled under his skin. There was nothing in him that could inspire any sort of reaction now. The Auror or Warden could turn their wands and blast him with a Cruciatus Curse and he would scarcely have peeped. For all intents and purposes, Sirius Black was dead to the world, as the world had died on him that fateful night of All Hallows.

“What’d he go down for?” Warden asked offhandedly as he flicked his wand to remove the chains around Sirius’ wrists and ankles.

Auror-on-duty glared incredulously at Warden. “Treason, murder. What else do these Death Eaters go down for?”

“Eh?” Another flick of wand and Sirius was stripped of his damp clothes, down to his pants. Warden leered at his pale, lithe, unmarked body. At twenty-one years old, Sirius Black had fully shed much of the coltish gangly limbs of puberty and was now made of long limbs and lean muscle, and a casual easy grace that belied his aristocratic upbringing, even as he operated Inferius-like in his state of shock. “Pity he’s going to max. Them’s truly a gem, these Blacks.”

“Don’t be a pig,” Auror-on-duty replied as he shoved a bundle of stiff black and grey striped robes at Sirius. “Get dressed, boy, if you don’t want to be ogled like a piece of meat.”

Sirius pulled the robes over his shivering body mechanically, without a word. Warden was still watching him, a sinister gleam in his beady blue eyes glinting in the harsh white lights of the Administrative Office. If Sirius still had the wherewithal to be self-conscious, he would have knocked the leer off the man’s heavy-jawed face. As it were, he felt nothing still, his insides thoroughly scraped raw.

Warden waved his wand again and the air seemed to suck out of the room as the lights blinked once and two dementors winked into existence. “Cell block D should do nicely, I think. Ain’t no human guards up there, boy,” he told Sirius, that greedy leer seemingly permanently etched onto his mouth, “but we may have some reprieve for your sort in your annual inspections.”

Auror-on-duty could barely hide his disgust. “I do not want to know what you people do to your inmates besides terrorize them with dementors. Are we done here?”

“Aye,” said Warden, and cold, slimy hands took hold of Sirius’ wrists as the dementors flanked him on either side, their cold, inhuman aura leaching whatever warmth out of his pale skin. “Welcome to Azkaban, boy.”

And even as the dementors seemed to suck out whatever joy there might have been left in his heart as they escorted him out of the Administrative Office, Sirius Black laughed, loud, ragged, and filled with despair.


	2. Chapter 2

As most prisons go, whether in the muggle or magical world, most people quite knew nothing of what Azkaban was like save for the people who had actually been there. The name of the dark wizard prison functioned something like the most horrendous of epithets: no one uttered Azkaban unless they were wishing the furthest depths of hellfire and brimstone on their sworn enemies. Wizards had very little use for religion as magic enabled them to make miracles out of the most mundane waves of their wands and a bit of fancy Latin spellcasting, so Azkaban functioned less like the wizarding world’s idea of hell so much as the last stop of the infernally wicked. Azkaban was a place where the sun did not shine, where the night sky was endless, infinite, eternally dark. It was the place where Dark wizards went and they were forgotten - the Auror wardens throwing away the key to the lock that damned the inmates to eternal horror more excruciating that the sharpest casting of the Cruciatus Curse.

Sirius Black was not most people.

Growing up, Azkaban had been a cautionary tale in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black in a manner that made normal people flinch away in instinctual fear of the person uttering the story, and it was a story Sirius knew well. When he was five and Regulus four, Kreacher would hiss the story to the Black brothers as a place of unending nightmare: a dark fortress, lost in the middle of the North Sea, the lone light that shone atop the jagged battlements of its ruined tower serving as a lure to lost, frostbitten sailors desperate for a safe harbour from the raging sea storms of the desolate seas, and a place of endless fascination for two little boys desperate for a sense of adventure as they spent long winter days shut up in the mausoleum that was 12 Grimmauld Place.

Those stories of Azkaban and the Dark Wizard, Ekrizdis, had been Sirius’ favorite bedtime stories, for what was a dark fortress and a dark wizard to a Black, but a sign of the heights of accomplishment? Both he and Regulus had once upon a time aspired to be an accomplished Dark Wizard who commanded his own dark fortress in a lonely island in the middle of the sea. What an adventure it would have been—luring pirates and sailors and selkie and merfolk alike to convert into their legions of worshippers and subjects.

Ah, the doggone days of childhood and innocence—shattered all too soon when Hogwarts let out for the summer and their eldest cousin, thirteen-year-old Bellatrix, then the only one of their generation going to the elite magical school, heard the two boys playing a make believe at Ekrizdis against the muggle sailors. Sirius had always been Ekrizdis—Regulus harbored no ambitions of becoming a wizard rich and powerful enough to have his own fortress on his own island in the middle of the sea, and anyway, Sirius was the Black scion, the one who would inherit the mind-boggling vastness of the Black fortune, so he’d be the one who could afford to buy an island and covert it into a hidden fortress.

Andromeda and Narcissa were off in the gardens doing boring things that prepubescent girls did like braid each other’s hair and admire their needlework as they smelled the early summer blooms, but Bellatrix the two boys had always enjoyed a certain closeness to. She wasn’t _girly_ like their two other cousins; Bellatrix was older, prettier, and she was cool. She was Sirius’ favorite relative from the moment she returned from her first winter break at Hogwarts the year before and showered her two small cousins with a Honeydukes bounty that put the display at Sugarplum in Diagon Alley to shame.

That summer, Bellatrix found her two little cousins playing with toy wands and stuffed dragons as invading wizard-Regulus stormed the Azkaban fortress where Dark Wizard Sirius resided, as Sirius towered over his little brother from his high perch on the Drawing Room sofa. Bellatrix watched them play for a moment, smiling a secret smile that Sirius would forever remember etched into his memory as the smile that his eldest cousin adopted behind her bone-white mask when she was murdering muggleborns and their families decades later as a Death Eater.

“Do you know what Ekrizdis did to the muggle sailors that washed ashore on Azkaban island?” she asked as little Sirius waved his toy wand that shot down little Regulus’ stuffed dragon mount.

The two boys stopped playing, identical grey eyes wide as they turned to their favorite cousin, still dressed rather stuffily in her green and silver Slytherin robes as she stood by the door. They’d never heard what happened in the aftermath of the stories Kreacher had told them of Azkaban fortress and the dark wizard that resided within, and they dropped their toys and crowded around Bella, their eyes shining for tales of daring and adventure.

“What?” Regulus squeaked, his voice tiny and high and still had a hint of a lisp that Sirius’ never had, even when he’d been a toddler.

“Ekrizdis turned them into dementors,” Bella said, her voice tantalizing and promising tales of dark glory.

“What are dementors?” Sirius asked, his grey eyes sparkling with childish curiosity that, in hindsight, had been fodder for Bellatrix’s malicious mischief.

“They’re grotesque dark creatures—tortured souls living in eternal torment, and feeding on every happy thought, every bright memory of any human that come across them.” That secret smile widened into a grin full of malice. “They fly out of Azkaban in the middle of the night and chase after naughty little boys pretending to be worthless muggles lost at sea.”

The sound of her cackling as Regulus ran out of the drawing room in tears, crying for their mother, would forever be etched into Sirius’ memory. That night, and every night of that horrid summer of 1965, Regulus would suffer horrific nightmares of muggle sailors being tortured in the basement of Grimmauld Place, their dehydrated, emaciated bodies laid out on the stone table in the cold, damp kitchens as a dark wizard loomed over them, his wand emitting the only sinister light in the greedy gloom. Regulus would wake in the middle of the night, tiptoe into Sirius’ bedroom and shove his older brother awake. In the darkness, his grey eyes shone with tears and unnamed horror, and Sirius would hug his brother and beckon him into bed, hoping to wrap him in the heavy Egyptian cotton of his bedspread, and the warm protection of an older brother’s arms, to keep Regulus’ nightmares at bay.

That was the summer they stopped playing with Bellatrix, and perhaps the summer that Sirius had the first inklings of what it meant to be a dark wizard, and that he wanted no part of it, though it would be surprising that for most people who came to know Sirius that he didn’t actually turn away from what it meant to be a dark wizard until well into the first term of his first year in Hogwarts, a good seven years after he’d first decided he would never _be_ a dark wizard. Perhaps it was childish naïveté that wanted to believe the best of the stilted, unloving farce that Sirius came to realize was his family’s dynamic, that for all that Orion and Walburga were unloving parents, they didn’t form the image of what Sirius recognized as a dark wizard and witch until he came home his first Christmas holiday from Hogwarts.

His image of his family then was a bit like the mental image of how he’d envisioned Azkaban: at first, a forbidding but powerful fortress controlled by a powerful mage (the same as the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black was a powerful family with a powerful couple at its helm), and later, a terrible place of nightmares where horror and abomination abound among the wicked (just as the Black family bred the worst of wizardkind: bigoted, intolerant, violent… crazy.)

It was hysterical, therefore, for someone as self-aware as he was that he himself was the lone Black carted off to spend the rest of his miserable existence in Azkaban, the one bad egg in the cesspit of maniacal inbred fools convicted of crimes he did not commit. If Sirius had ever subscribed to the notion that there was a higher power governing mankind’s miserable existence, then this power, this _god_ , was as fickle as he was cruel, for no man, however evil, deserved the fate to which Sirius Black was sentenced.

 _Of course,_ he thought wryly as he stared at the at the cold unfeeling dirty stone walls that now made up the four corners of his new home, _idiots like me probably deserve no better_.

These were thoughts that drifted past him in a sort of sluggish stream, not unlike that of the slow trickle of rain water that dripped from the massive crack in the ceiling of his squat ten-by-ten cell. They were slow moving, these thoughts from his childhood, drifting and flitting through his waking mind like he had very little control over his own head. For all he knew, he didn’t.

He’d been in Azkaban for less than a week, though really, with how isolated he was, he had no real clue of how much time had passed. His cell was hewed of black unyielding stone, the sort seemed to reflect and reverberate the sounds of his thoughts all around himself. He wasn’t alone in this section of Azkaban. This high up the tower was where the worst of the worst were incarcerated.

When he’d been marched to his cell by a pair of dementors, he’d passed a few occupied cells, some of the occupants were people he knew, people he’d helped put there himself: Rookwood, the Ministry lackey who’d been stealing research from the Department of Mysteries, Dolohov, the foreign wizard with a thirst for blood and torture (Sirius remembered him well as he’d posed among the recruits himself, back when he’d been in active service to the Order. He’d been found out and captured and later escaped, of course, and there had been no proof to convict anyone until much later, when Dolohov was apprehended after murdering the Prewett twins in a brutal attack in Wimbourne), Mulciber, Snape’s equally greasy, sniveling friend back when they were in Hogwarts, Pyrites, who Sirius was surprised preceded him in Azkaban before he remembered where he’d last seen him and his distinctive lopsided strawberry blond ponytail that made Sirius think of a pig’s curled tail: Pyrites had been the Death Eater he’d Stunned outside the Potter’s house. So the Aurors had caught him after all… There were a few more empty cells he’d passed, but he’d been placed at the very end of the long, silent corridor.

When he’d first been shut in, he’d wondered, rather incongruously, how the tower could be so silent, like there was no one else there when there were at four other people on the same floor as him.

That was before night had fallen and the dementors came. In that dreadful summer when Bellatrix had frightened Sirius and Regulus out of their wits with the story of the creation of dementors, she’d continued to harangue them with stories of what she’d learned of Azkaban from her History of Magic class: the memory of the creation of the dementors had seeped so deep into the foundations of the tower that the very stones that stood up the fortress were sealed in the constant silent horror of the pain and torture those muggle sailors and Ekrizdis’ enemies that the terror they produced drowned out any sound produced by any of the prison’s inmates. Inside the cells, the only company an inmate would have were the horror of his own thoughts and that silent, unidentifiable terror that seeped out of the stone walls.

And then at night, when the dementors came, that was when the true horror started.

Sirius thought he wouldn’t be able to hang on to a thread of his sanity when the meager light that entered his cell died with the cold emptiness of the night. He’d felt the whisper of the ethereal ragged fabric that made up the dementors hiss from the stone floors of the corridor. In his mind, he heard a most terrible wailing, the sound of which he hoped he’d never have to hear again, a caterwauling cry, an obscene litany of his endless sins: _filth, blood traitor, abomination of my flesh_. The sound of his mother shrieking at him in unbounded rage as the Stinging Hexes morphed into Knockback Jinxes and Stunning Spells, and then, a spell he’d never felt until he’d been caught that time he’d spied on the Death Eater recruitments: the Cruciatus Curse, only this time, instead of the streak of red light shooting towards him in his mind’s eye from some faceless Death Eater’s wand, it came from his mother, from his father, his grandparents, and ever member of the Black family that counted Sirius a failure, a worthless, good for nothing traitor, consorting with mudbloods and blood traitors and filthy half-breeds. That wasn’t the worst, though.

The darkest part of the night always came with the most horrible of his memories, the worst of his tormented thoughts: half-remembered images of James’ limp, sightless body crumpled at the staircase of his destroyed home, terrible images of Lily dead on the floor in Harry’s nursery, and Harry shrieking up a terrified storm as the cut on his forehead dripped warm sanguine blood. Through it all, the image of Wormtail, one of his dearest friends, one of his brothers, betraying him, betraying _James_ —

In the morning, he shivered in the damp, his face streaked with tears of terror, and the steadfast hope that someone would come for him. He was from the Order. Dumbledore would figure it out, the Secret Keeper swap. Or Moony would, though how, he was never certain, for he’d ostracized Moony so thoroughly when Peter started insinuating that Moony might have had something to do with Marlene’s death… There weren’t many of them left in the Order, but they would come through, he could feel it.

But as the days progressed, and the nights grew longer, and the ice of winter set in, still no one came. Still the corridor was silent, still but for the occasional whimper of helpless terror from one of the other inmates, or the gibbering of fear when the dementors came past. And still no one came, and Sirius started to believe that perhaps he may have misjudged how much trust he’d placed in the friends he’d once counted on to save his life, for it seemed a certainty now that none of them ever really cared, for those that truly did--James, Lily--they were gone, and it was all his fault.

And it was that betrayal that ultimately tested his sanity in the nights to come.


End file.
